How to set up a photo gallery

You can easily publish digital photos as an online gallery for your friends and family to view. To do so, you'll need to create a new folder in your files, upload your photos into that folder, and then create a FastMail photo gallery website.

Create a new folder in your files

From the menu in the top left, go to the Files app.

Click the "More actions" drop-down menu and select Create subfolder. A new text field appears.

Name your subfolder whatever `wish and click Do. The page refreshes and a new folder appears in your files list.

Add photos to your new folder

Click the name of your newly created folder to open it. To add photos, use the Upload section at the bottom of the page.

Click the Choose File button to select the file you wish to upload. To upload more than one photo at a time, click the Upload multiple button. Alternatively, zip the photos on your computer then tick the Unzip checkbox and select the single zip file.

Click the Upload button to add the photos to your new folder.

Create the photo gallery

Once you have uploaded files to a folder, you can create a photo gallery by clicking the Websites button, located on the top and bottom right of the file list. This button will take you to the "File Storage Websites" page. To create a new photo gallery:

In the "Create website" section at the bottom, select your Website — this is the web address where your website will be published. Choose the domain you wish to use from your aliases and personal domains, and optionally enter a further subdomain section before it, or a path after it. If you are using your own domain, you must host your name servers with FastMail, not just your MX records.

In the Publish As drop-down select one of the photo gallery options.

In the File Storage Target drop-down, select the folder that you uploaded your photos to.

If you'd like to set a password to make your gallery private, you can specify one in the Password field. This will deny access to anyone who does not know the password.

Click the Create website button. Your photos are published and accessible at the web address you specified.

Change the style of a photo gallery

The two default styles use exactly the same HTML, but different stylesheets. You can create your own CSS stylesheet, and use that with the photo gallery, if you prefer.

If there is a file photogallery.css in the same directory as the photos, then it will be used to display the gallery page.

Change the sort order of a photo gallery

A photo gallery can be sorted by filename, date, or using a custom sort order. To change the sort order:

Navigate to the folder that contains the pictures in the photo gallery.

Click the More actions drop-down menu, and select Photos. This changes the view of the folder so you can preview your images, add titles or comments, and more.

Click the More Actions menu again, and select an option under the Sort gallery (if any) section.

You can manually specify a sort order by entering a sorting rank in the "Sort order" field for each of your photos. Entering a 1 in the field, for example, makes that photo appear first. Entering a 2 makes that photo appear second, and so on. Select Sort order from the More Actions menu to have the album sorted according to the ranks you assigned.

Change comments on a photo

By default, any comments found in the file are displayed with each picture. In the grid view of the gallery, they will display when you hover over a photo's thumbnail. In the slideshow view, they will display below the photo. To add or change comments to your photos:

Navigate to the folder that contains the pictures in the photo gallery.

Click the More actions drop-down menu, and select Photos. This changes the view of the folder so you can preview your images, add titles or comments, and more.

Edit a photo's title and comments, and click the Save comments button.

You can include some basic html tags in the comments, for example <b> to bold text, and so forth. If you add a URL, such as http://example.com, it will automatically be converted into a hyperlink.

Add special comments with EXIF

If your photos contain EXIF data, these comments will be imported when you upload the photos. Certain lines within a comment are treated specially. The lines must be of the form: Tag: Value.

FastMail will look for EXIF tags in this order: ImageDescription, Description, UserComment, Headline, Caption-Abstract, LocalCaption. FastMail also supports special comments. The list that follows can be helpful if you wish to use EXIF data to categorise and label your photos.

Title

Like entering a value in the Title field, but can be useful if you want to include a specific title via EXIF comments instead.

Uplink

In the photo gallery, if you have sub-directories, they'll be automatically displayed as sub-galleries. Within each sub-gallery there will be a link to go up to the parent directory.

By default, the link text will be the name of the parent directory. Using this tag, you can override the text used to be anything you want.

Additionally by default, the directory that is the "root" of a website will not have an up link by default. If you specify an Uplink attribute in the comment of that directory though, it will get an uplink.

UplinkURL

Like the 'Uplink' item above, this lets you control the URL used on the uplink in a photo gallery.

IsCover

If set to any true value (e.g. 1, Yes, etc.), then that image is used as the cover of the album when the parent directory is viewed. If no image has an IsCover item set, then a random image is used as the album cover image.